Nolan Bushnell has started a website, Wordplay.com, that teaches people Spanish in a fun way. Similar to the more educational games on the NintendoDS. He claimed that his Wordplay.com Spanish vocabulary game can help kids learn Spanish five or six times faster than Rosetta Stone, the popular language software. He said that the games adapt to a user’s level of knowledge, known as adaptive practice, and will be combined with metrics and tutoring to recreate curricula for schools.
Now learning faster than Rosetta Stone is a feat in its own. Rosetta Stone can have anyone speaking Spanish in minutes.
The adaptive practice is a very unique aspect of this type of educational software. Most educational games are made rudimentary on one level plane. Everyone learns the same way and for those that learn faster there's no real challenge. If Wordplay adapts to your level of learning and challenges you on a higher level then it would definitely earn more merit in say a classroom setting. Teachers can now use this as a measure and aid to help students who are struggling and be able to pinpoint what areas they are struggling in.
With all the budget cuts going around nationally in education we should give this free software a shot. Here's what Nolan had to say during his speech at Gamebeat 2011:
“The public school system with its bureaucracy and unions and bullshit are stuck,” he said. “The pressure is building. There will be an earthquake. That will happen with the bankruptcy of California in two years. There is no chance California will fix itself with unfunded pensions and runaway public sector costs. It’s going to be like Greece. We don’t have the European Community to bail us out. It’s going to have to be the federal government, but California is a huge economy.”
Well Nolan, if you can make something to better the world as Pong did, I got your back.
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